A Kennedy, a governor, a Whittaker: Saluting Americans on Everest

The Mountaineers threw a big-scale celebration of Americans’ first climb of the world’s tallest peak on Saturday night, with an autographed ice axe auctioned for $5,000, a lifetime achievement award to Big Jim Whittaker — first U.S. climber to reach the summit of Mount Everest — and tales of high adventure and romping, athletic Kennedy children.

The “Everest 50” event celebrated the golden anniversary of the American climb, with celebrity environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on hand to fete Whittaker. Big Jim guided his senator-father to the summit of Mount Kennedy in the Yukon, after Canada named its highest unclimbed peak for the 35th president.

The 1963 American expedition put six climbers, five from the U.S. and a Sherpa from Nepal, on the summit of Mt. Everest.

It was a very macho evening, but with a nervous undertone: The mountaineering and conservation communities fear they are losing the interest of young people, who prefer electronic gadgets to God’s great out-of-doors.

“Anybody who climbs in the Himalayas today is climbing in the footsteps of giants, and giants were members of the 1963 American expedition on Everest,” declared MC Brent Bishop, whose father summited in the expedition. A moment later, introducing Robert Kennedy Jr., Bishop declared: “His C.V. (curriculum vitae) goes on for page after page.”

The young Bobby Kennedy paid tribute to Whittaker as “a part of the family,” saying: “He taught my father things about wilderness and the importance of wilderness that became part of my father’s gestalt . . . Jim Whittaker is the example of the best thing our country produces.”

But Kennedy winged his way into several amusing bloopers.

Noting the presence of Gov. Jay Inslee, Kennedy said: “This is the best guy we had for leadership in the Senate.” Inslee served in the House. A moment later, he described Mount Kennedy as “the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies.” Actually, the 14,000-foot peak is hundreds of miles away in the St. Elias Range, near the Yukon-Alaska border.

Kennedy spoke of starting a river raft-guiding business with his brother, saying, “We did first ascents on rivers all over North America and in South America.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: The celebrity environmentalist saluted Jim Whittaker, first American atop Mt. Everest: “He taught my father things about wilderness and the importance of wilderness . . .”

The lawyer-environmentalist evoked Holy Scripture, urging listeners to “understand that there’s a God out there that’s bigger than us,” and sounded a Thoreau-like theme: “If you want to see the soul of American democracy, you must look in the mirror of Walden Pond.”

Whittaker is now a very well-preserved 84 years old. He’s still plainspoken and avuncular, saying: “Thank God for people like Bobby Kennedy: Maybe there’s hope for this planet,” and of the Kennedy family: “They’re tree huggers and outdoor nuts like all of us here.”

The 1963 climb was dominated by Northwest climbers, four of whom reached the 29,028-foot summit of Everest. Why? Just look at the 14,410-foot volcano on Seattle’s southern horizon. “We had the glaciers and the altitude and the storms on Mount Rainier,” said Whittaker, who with his brother Lou started guiding there at an early age. “It was this club (The Mountaineers) that got us going.”

Big Jim has gone on to other adventures, notably leading two expeditions — one a flop, the other successful — to 28,250-foot K2, the world’s second-highest peak (and a much tougher climb than Everest) and organizing the Mount Everest Earth Day 20 International Peace Climb in 1990, which put American, Soviet and Chinese climbers on top of the world.

Among the Americans on the Peace Climb, joked Whittaker, “We had three lawyers. I asked one of them, ‘How did you sleep?’ He replied, ‘I slept like a lawyer. First, I’d lie on one side and then I’d lie on the other.'”

Actually, there are two celebrations of the 1963 Everest climb. The first, Saturday night, featured Whittaker’s autobiography “A Life on the Edge,” being reissued this year by Mountaineers Books. The second, on May 22, will celebrate reissue of Tom Hornbein’s classic “Everest: The West Ridge,” one of the greatest mountaineering books ever written about one of the greatest climbs ever done.

After Whittaker and Nawang Gombu summited via the South Col route on May 7, 1963 — a climb now done by hundreds, with fixed ropes — Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld set out to scale the unclimbed West Ridge.

“We felt the need to do something new,” Hornbein said in an earlier interview. “We wanted to do something different. The fact that the South Col route had been done a few times didn’t quite click. We needed more uncertainty. We needed a crack at a second route.”

They ascended the West Ridge, determined that it would be suicidal to descend a couloir of loose rock, so traversed the mountain after reaching the summit in late afternoon. They descended the South Col route, where they met up with Barry Bishop and Lute Jerstad, who had summited via the South Col earlier that day.

Such challenges as the Hillar Step did not have fixed ropes in place at the time. Darkness descended. The four climbers spent a night at 28,000 feet. They survived because, miraculously, jet stream winds did not buffet the upper reaches of Everest that night. Still, Unsoeld lost nine toes to frostbite.

Looking out at Hornbein in the audience Saturday, Whittaker quipped: “I still don’t know why the hell he went up there and spent the night at 28,000 feet.” It was said in jest, of course.

Willi Unsoeld was later killed in an avalanche on Mount Rainier while leading a late fall climb with students at The Evergreen State College. His widow, Jolene Unsoeld, would become a front-rank advocate for open government and limiting toxic wastes, served in the Washington Legislature and was elected three times to Congress. She was at the dinner Saturday night.

What did her husband say about a night at 28,000 feet? “He told me, ‘It must have been a beautiful night. It must because the wind did not blow. I remember none of it.'”